Innovative Practice and Implications of Empathy Education in Japan from the Perspective of Medical Humanities

The expansion of technological instrumentalism in modern medicine has triggered a crisis in medical humanities,highlighting the ethical necessity of reconstructing the cultivation system of empathy among medical students.Through literature analysis and comparative research,this study identifies three distinctive practices in medical empathy education in Japan:narrative medicine education centered on local literary texts and illness narratives;digitalized instructional approaches based on the patient experience database DIPEx-Japan;and interactive training models involving patient-participatory classrooms.The findings suggest that Japan has developed a culturally distinctive system of empathy education in medicine through the modern transformation of traditional cultural resources,innovative applications of information technology,and reconfiguration of doctor-patient relationships.This practice-oriented pathway integrates professional medical education with humanistic care through cultural translation,preserving the traditional ethical core of "medicine as an art of benevolence" while addressing contemporary medical ethical challenges through institutionalized pedagogical design.It offers valuable cross-cultural references for China in addressing challenges such as insufficient localization,weak integration,and lack of systematic paradigms in empathy education,and provides insights for constructing a modern empathy education framework with distinctive Eastern ethical characteristics.